Posty – A comprehensive, modern Postfix and Dovecot administration tool | Hacker News Reader

Posty – A comprehensive, modern Postfix and Dovecot administration tool

posty-soft.org

13 pointsyankcrime12 comments

What problem does this solve? And does it do so without introducing a half dozen more?

I'm not 100% sure yet, but I'm 100% excited about this. Problems today is that Google/Yahoo/MS have all given the government backdoor access to your email if you have those providers. This application solves that by having you host your own email service. Deploying postfix + dovecot with multi domain usage and multi alias capabilities is hard! They did all that work for you. I'm not sure how the client works yet or if you're supposed to make your own front end to this using the API from Posty. Either way I'm excited to try it out in hopes to move my email out of the hands of big companies and into my own hands.

> Deploying postfix + dovecot with multi domain usage and multi alias capabilities is hard!

Really? I didn't find it so; overall it took me about four hours, including RBL filtering via Spamhaus[1], and I haven't had to touch it in years.

Granted, I've done a lot of sysadmin work. But there are some really excellent howtos on setting up that stack, and I don't really see how adding a poorly documented Ruby API, witb what I found a frankly lousy web UI layer on top of it, does anything to simplify the task; you're better off, I think, spending that time on gaining facility with actually administering Postfix and Dovecot, than dealing with an API that's maybe helpful for a large multihost install but whose added complexity cost really isn't justified on any smaller scale.

[1] The Zen RBL is free to use as long as you make fewer than eighty thousand requests per day. I wholeheartedly recommend it; using it cut my spam to zero for years.

Hosting your own email server is interesting, but don't forget that if 2/3 of your contacts use Gmail/Yahoo/MS, your messages are also stored there.

Exactly. This makes it a bit easier to run your own stable mail server.

It looks to me like adding more complexity than it relieves, and I'd worry about the security implications besides.

postfix is a really old, but very stable email server. This puts a modern API on top of it.

I really like it. I was doing a one-time email type of service that had to manually create and destroy 100's of email addresses a day. This would have helped out a lot when getting started. I had to write/hack custom tools that barely worked. I would have loved this.

Whats that gibberish after Library usage examples at http://www.posty-soft.org/doc_client.html

Go to the github repo https://github.com/iaddict/posty_client

On github: https://github.com/posty

Site isn't loading atm...

This looks fantastic; self-hosted email is too hard. Can't wait to try it...

I'm really not sure how I feel about those huge square tiles

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